Put Your Face in Ghost
Recon Tutorial
Introduction
This guide will teach you how to put your
very own face in Ghost Recon. I came into doing this after
reading the "Ghost Recon Skin Tutorial" by Ruin
in the GhostRecon.net RECON Section. I haven't seen any other
tutorials that teach you how to do this, so I decided to write
one.
What You Will Need
- Digital Camera, or a photo of your face
on your hard drive
- Ghost Recon RSB
Conversion Utility
- Adobe Photoshop (or any good image editor)
and basic knowledge of its use.
- RSB Plugin for Adobe Photoshop
Getting Started
In this tutorial, I decided to put make
myself a rifleman, but you could also do this to any Specialist
or other class soldier.
First, go to your Ghost Recon Directory\Mods\Origmiss\Textures
folder and make a copy of the Allied folder
there, then use the RSB Conversion Utility and convert everything
in the Allied folder copy we just made. Then, depending on
your skin color, choose a texture you want to use. In the
texture name, you will find an abbreviation of the race/skin
color the texture is.
- icg_asn_cmo: Asian skin
- icg_blk_cmo: Black skin
- icg_hsp_cmo: Hispanic skin
- icg_wht_cmo: White skin
Note: The number and whether it's a "blink"
skin doesn't matter, since the only thing they differ in is
the face, which we're going to edit.
Changing the Face
Now open the skin of your choice, mine was
icg_wht_cmo_**. Now open your face
picture, or anything with your face in it. Now, try to cut
your face in the shape of the skins face. I have marked how
I basically cut out my face. Since my picture was kind of
small, I had to resize it also.

Use the red line as a guide line in what
shape you cut out your face, or as long as its anything close,
also, make sure not to cover the helmet straps,or else it
will kind of look stupid with the straps missing on the chin
only.
That's
how it should look about, since I had to resize my face,
which made it all blurry.
I suggest if you have to resize yours, just use the
Sharpen tool in your image editor. |
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Perfecting the Face
Now, select the layer with your face only
(in Photoshop, when you paste something in, it automatically
creates a new layer for it) and go to the Image
menu, choose Adjust and under that
sub-menu select Levels..., as you
could see, my skin is way to bright, it doesn't match the
rest.
So I had to darken
it as well as change the hue and saturation. Just go
to Image, Adjust and take Hue/Saturation.
Of course, you have to figure out what you have to
do to make it match, I'm just giving examples of what
I had to do in my case. Now I look something like this
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Here's the tricky part, you could
still see the difference between my face and the rest
of the skin. So, right click on the Layer icon with
the face and choose Select Layer Transparency.
Then go to the Select menu, go under
Modify and take Border,
in the pixel box, put in 4, we don't want it to be too
big to mess up the skin.
Then go to Filter, Blur and choose
Blur More. Then, blur any areas
that stick out using the Lasso tool to select them.
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Now your face should look something like this:
This is good, there's not much of a difference between the
rest of the skin and the face, and since we blended it, the
face doesn't stand out. Now go to the Layer menu, and take
Flatten Image. Put the skin into
one layer. Now, go to File and choose Save
As Copy, when the Save window appears, make sure it
says Save as: RSBBitmap (*.RSB;*.RSB) and save the skin to
Mods\Origmiss\Textures\Allied, since
we're going to make a new rifleman, don't
overwrite anything! It's not necessary, just
name it whatever you like, I named it myface.rsb.
Creating a "Blink" face"
It's basically the
same thing but with eyes closed, hoping that you still
left our previous face open, and save it already as
specified, open the same skin we modified, but the "blink"
version, it ends with _blink.
Now take the Lasso tool and select the right eye as
seen here. |
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Copy that,
then past it on your right eye, adjust the Levels and
Hue/Saturation on it as we did before with the face.
It should look something like this. |
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Now, right-click
on the Layer icon of the eyelid you just pasted, and take
Select Layer Transparency. And again, do a Border of 4
as with the face before. Then, do Blend More, do it until
it's good enough for you. Now
it should look somewhat like this. |
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The thing is about
the "blink" skin though, it shows once in
a while for a split second, when the character blinks
in the game, so it doesn't have to be that detailed.
But there's no eyebrow there though, and that has to
be fixed.
Use the pencil tool and draw a crooked line like this. |
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This should have all been done in the layer with the eyelid.
Now select the eyelid layer if it
isn't already and just go to Filters and do Blur More
twice, now it should look something like this.
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Which is
good enough, now right-click on the eyelid layer, and
select duplicate and press
Ok. Then, select the duplicate layer and go to Edit,
Transform and flip it horizontally
and move it over to the other eye.
Now it should look like this. |
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Now all you have to do is Merge the layers
again, and go to the File menu and choose Save as Copy and
save this to Mods\Origmiss\Textures\Allied,
call this myfaceblink, make sure
you're saving it as RSBBitmap again.
Creating your own character
This is the part where we actually put yourself
in the game. I decided to make myself a rifleman, I went to
\Mods\Origmiss\Actor\rifleman and
copied rifleman-01 or anything, doesn't really matter, just
give it a number that's not there, or if you want, just open
up the original one and do the same thing we do to the copy,
except instead of giving it a different name, just save it.
So open up that .ATR file using Notepad,
and just read the whole thing, now you're going to find out
that you can do quite much in this little file. But most importantly,
go to where it says <ActorName>(Name
of rifleman)</ActorName>, there you could put
in your own name to appear in game.
Now change the face texture to the one we
created, so where it says <ModelFace>(whatever filename)</ModelFace>,
put <ModelFace>myface.rsb</ModelFace>,
and the BlinkFaceName to <BlinkFaceName>myfaceblink.rsb</MyFaceBlink>.
You could also change the stats here for
those of you who want your character to have Specialist-like
abilities or who just want to beef him up, the Max number
of points is 8, so don't overdo it. Now, if you're overwriting
a character like I said in the beginning, just save it, if
you're not, than see which number isn't taken (I think they
only go to 60, but not sure) and save it with that number
as rifleman-**.atr (** being the free number).
Also, you could make your own
skin for the entire model, if you want to than refer to the
Ghost Recon Skin Tutorial by Ruin at GhostRecon.net's RECON
Section..

The face so far.
Face Painting
I already made an authentic
Polish Army uniform, and I proudly kill Terrorists now. The
person you are looking at in this picture will be me in my
homeland's uniform with face painting, which is easy to do,
just make a new layer under the head skin layer, change the
head skin layer from Normal to Multiply, and draw a couple
of green lines, I just opened up a random face texture from
the Allied folder and drew the same lines. So now your faces
should start looking somewhat like this

Shot
Jan 2003
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